{"id":5969,"date":"2017-09-20T08:08:17","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T15:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/?p=5969"},"modified":"2017-09-20T09:29:37","modified_gmt":"2017-09-20T16:29:37","slug":"my-new-gig-augmenting-reality-in-google-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/20\/my-new-gig-augmenting-reality-in-google-research\/","title":{"rendered":"My brand new gig: Augmenting reality in Google Research"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m stupid-excited to say that I\u2019ve just joined Google\u2019s <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">Skynet<\/span> Machine Perception team to build kickass creative, expressive experiences, delivering augmented reality to (let\u2019s hope) a billion+ people. I <em>told<\/em>\u00a0you <a href=\"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2017\/08\/16\/sht-gets-real-google-acquires-aimatter-maker-of-the-fabby-computer-vision-app\/\">sh*t just got real<\/a>. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Now, the following career bits may be of interest only to me (and possibly my mom), but in case you\u2019re wondering, \u201cWait, don\u2019t you work on Google Photos\u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well, like SNL\u2019s Stefon, \u201cI\u2019ve had a weird couple of years\u2026\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"NewImage.png\" src=\"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/NewImage-23.png\" alt=\"NewImage\" width=\"598\" height=\"367\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The greatly smoothed version goes basically like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I joined Google in early 2014 to work on Photos. I liked to say I was &#8220;Teaching Google Photoshop,&#8221; meaning getting computers to see &#038; synthesize like humans (making your Assistant your artist!). Among other things, we created a brand-new image editor, did some early <a href=\"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/27\/come-get-a-halloween-makeover-from-google\/\">AR face-painting work<\/a> (a year+ ahead of Snapchat et al), and <a href=\"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/24\/check-out-your-year-in-photos\/\">made movies<\/a> for tens of millions of people.<\/li>\n<li>After a bit over a year, I wanted to explore some crazier photo- and video-related ideas (stuff not ready for Photos to include then, if ever), so I left the team &amp; walked across the hall to work with &amp; learn from\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/lukew\">Luke Wroblewski<\/a>. Thus I was \u201cworking at Google on <em>photos<\/em>, just not <em>Photos.<\/em>\u201d This was a subtle distinction, and as I was working on secret stuff, I didn\u2019t spend time publicizing it. I remained closely involved with the ex-Nik Photos folks in building out Snapseed &amp; the <a href=\"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/17\/the-google-photos-editor-gets-smarter-more-powerful\/\">next rev of the new editor<\/a> we\u2019d started.<\/li>\n<li>Meanwhile I spent the better part of the next year thinking up, prototyping, and iterating on a bunch of little photo apps. It was a tough but enlightening process. I know we were on to something, but I also felt like Edison saying some variant of\u00a0\u201cI have not failed. I&#8217;ve just found 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Somewhat tired from the process &amp; eager to make concrete contributions, I was set to join an imaging hardware team. When project plans changed, however, I agreed to help improve photography experiences on social apps including Google+.<\/li>\n<li>Having witnessed on Photos the massive importance of speed, I teamed up with my future teammates in Research to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.blog.google\/products\/google-plus\/saving-you-bandwidth-through-machine-learning\/\">build out the RAISR machine-learning library<\/a>\u00a0and ship it in Google+, saving users immense amounts of bandwidth (critical in the developing world).<\/li>\n<li>Since then, and up until this week, I\u2019ve been focusing on enterprise social needs. Though it wasn\u2019t an area I sought out, I ended up really digging the experience, and I look forward to eventually sharing some of the rad stuff my team was building.<\/li>\n<li>And then, Google bought this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fab.by\/\">little company in Belarus<\/a> &amp; my old Research friends came calling&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So now we\u2019ve come full circle, and to capture my feelings, I\u2019ll cite SNL yet again. Wish me luck. \ud83d\ude42\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/embed\/3o7TKNthed4OG7T5Je\" width=\"600\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m stupid-excited to say that I\u2019ve just joined Google\u2019s Skynet Machine Perception team to build kickass creative, expressive experiences, delivering augmented reality to (let\u2019s hope) a billion+ people. I told\u00a0you sh*t just got real. \ud83d\ude42 Now, the following career bits may be of interest only to me (and possibly my mom), but in case you\u2019re [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5969"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5969"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5977,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5969\/revisions\/5977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}